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AR 22:31 - Silicon Valley's fixation on cheating death
In this issue:
DEATH - the serious money being thrown at dreams for immortality
ISLAM - a "pathbreaking work for English-speaking students of the Qur'an"
POLITICS - "establishing a new religious test for U.S. government officials"
Apologia Report 22:31 (1,351)
August 10, 2017
PLEASE NOTE: Our office will be closed for the next week. Look for AR to resume with the week beginning August 23.
DEATH
"Life Without End: Silicon Valley is experiencing a mini-boom in biotech companies devoted to 'curing' death" by Elmo Keep -- introduces Aubrey de Grey, founder of the nonprofit SENS [Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, <sens.org>], the world's first organization dedicated to "curing" human aging, and who "drinks three or four pints of ale a day, and swears it hasn't kept him from maintaining the same vigor he felt as a teenager in London." Mr. de Grey "believes, for example, that the first person who will live to be 1,000 years old has most likely already been born." If it weren't printed in Smithsonian Magazine (Jun '17, pp44-54), that statement would be enough to make one conclude that de Grey is just another over-the-top salesman.
However, SENS happens to be significant. "The basic vision behind SENS is that aging isn't an inevitable process by which your body just happens to wear out over time. Rather, it's the result of specific biological mechanisms that damage molecules or cells. ...
"The area of research that gives the organization its name has to do with senescent cells. ... These are cells that stop dividing but accumulate inside us, secreting proteins that contribute to inflammation. ...
"As de Grey's thinking goes, if we could figure out how to remove senescent cells using approaches like drugs or gene therapy, along with other types of repair, we could potentially keep our bodies vital forever.
"This desire to eradicate aging has, in the last decade, inspired a mini-boom of private investment in Silicon Valley, where a handful of labs have sprung up in SENS' shadow, funded most notably by tech magnates. The secretive Calico <calicolabs.com> was established by Google, in collaboration with Apple chairman Arthur Levinson, to tackle the problem of aging. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have invested $3 billion in the attempt to 'cure all disease.' Amazon's Jeff Bezos invested some of his fortune in South San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology <unitybiotechnology.com>, which has been targeting cell senescence in animal trials and hopes to begin human drug trials next year. ...
"SENS has also been the beneficiary of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, perhaps Silicon Valley's best-known advocate for curing death. As Thiel told the Washington Post in 2015, 'I've always had this really strong sense that death was a terrible, terrible thing.... I prefer to fight it.'
"Immortality, it turns out, is not such an easy sell: Most people don't like the idea of living forever. ... When the Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2013 <goo.gl/W9Kysu> whether they would use technologies that allowed them to live to 120 or beyond, 56 percent said no. Two-thirds of respondents believed that radically longer life spans would strain natural resources, and that these treatments would only ever be available to the wealthy. ...
"I ask de Grey how a planet full of immortals would support itself. Would people want to work for eternity? He answers that automation will take over most jobs. 'We will be able to spend our lives doing things that we find fulfilling and we won't have to worry about remuneration,' he says. ...
"De Grey has robust faith that humans will come up with 'some new way to distribute wealth that doesn't depend on being paid to do things we wouldn't otherwise do.' The first step, he believes, is issuing a universal basic income. It's an idea that's shared by other Bay Area entrepreneurs, many of whom are in the business of developing automation technologies. Last year, Y Combinator, a highly successful start-up incubator, gave 100 Oakland families between $1,000 and $2,000 a month in unconditional free income to find out how they'd spend it. The city of San Francisco recently announced plans to launch a similar pilot program."
Keep reports that "elderly humans are themselves an extremely recent phenomenon." Judy Campisi, biochemist and professor of biogerontology with the Buck Institute for Research on Aging <www.buckinstitute.org>, a "gleaming" non-profit research institution, finds: "For 99.9 percent of our human history as a species, there was no aging." Keep adds: "Humans were very likely to die by our 30s from predation, starvation, disease, childbirth or any number of violent events.
"Life spans in the developed world have more than doubled over the past century or so, but this hasn't happened through any interventions against aging itself. Rather, it's a byproduct of innovations....
"Campisi stresses that living forever is not the goal of most research on aging. Instead, she says it's primarily aimed not at life span but 'health span' - increasing the number of years that people can remain physically and mentally agile. ...
"'I have to tell you Aubrey has two hats,' she says, smiling. 'One he wears for the public when he's raising funds. The other hat is when he talks to a scientist like me, where he doesn't really believe that anyone will live to 1,000 years old. No.'" Later, Keep notes (unsurprisingly) that "advances in medicine haven't helped low-income Americans nearly as much as their wealthier counterparts."
Keep introduces Heidi Tissenbaum, professor of molecular, cell and cancer biology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and contributor to "Life Extension Pseudoscience and the SENS Plan" <www.goo.gl/nVcg1a> in MIT Technology Review (2006). Keep summarizes her findings: "extending life through lab-based means doesn't necessarily lead to good health. 'If applied to humans, this would likely lead to unsustainable healthcare costs,' she and her co-authors concluded in a 2015 study <www.goo.gl/jLBhnc> published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ...
"When it comes to extending life, [Campisi] says, 'we think the upper limit we could get to is around 115 to 120 years old....'"
(The online version of this article <www.goo.gl/zNM8TK> is titled "Can Human Mortality Really Be Hacked?")
The cover story of WIRED magazine's Aug '17 issue (pp56-67) is "A.I. > Artificial Immortality: A son's quest to give his father eternal life" by James Vlahos <www.goo.gl/sYUTsP> and is just another twist on the theme, this time via audio chatbot.
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ISLAM
The Koran in English: A Biography, by Bruce B. Lawrence, the Nancy and Jeffrey Marcus humanities professor emeritus of religion at Duke University and one of the preeminent scholars of Islamic studies in America [1] -- a "comprehensive look at English translations of the Qur'an, Islam's holy book. (Lawrence chooses to use the transliteration 'Koran' to signify the English version, which also allows him to functionally resolve the debate among some Muslims about whether the Qur'an can be translated from Arabic at all.) It was not until the 20th century that English translations began to proliferate, Lawrence writes, thanks to the pioneering work of South Asian Muslims who knew English well as a by-product of British imperialism on the Indian subcontinent. Lawrence helpfully identifies sectarian differences and political influences, explaining the outsize role of Saudi propagation of religiously conservative editions. He also devotes excessive attention to the creative rendering of the Qur'an done in 2015 by visual artist Sandow Birk [2]; his fine-grained examination of Birk's translation choices would make more sense if Birk's text were at hand. On the whole, however, Lawrence has done pathbreaking work for English-speaking students of the Qur'an." Publishers Weekly, 2017 May #2
Of Birk's Qur'an, Amazon says: "Following in the grand traditions of ancient Arabic and Islamic artists, he began hand-transcribing the entire Qur'an as was done in centuries past.... He then took each sura and set it against a backdrop from everyday American life, one that reflected his renowned 'skate-surf' ascetic. ...
"The project ... was not only welcomed by the Muslim community but also celebrated as an 'ambitious and valuable undertaking' (New York Times). ...
"[T]his lavishly designed volume - containing all 114 suras - melds the past with the present, East with the West like nothing before it. The result, hailed by Reza Aslan as 'a great favor, not only to Muslims, but also to Americans,' is one of the most original art books to appear in decades."
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POLITICS
"Two U.S. Senators Apply an Anti-Christian Religious Test for Government Officials" by Joe Carter, who begins with this background: "Last year, a controversy erupted when a political science professor at Wheaton College decided to wear a hijab during Advent in solidarity with Muslims. In a post on Facebook, Larycia Hawkins wrote, 'I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book. And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.'
"Many Christians disagreed with her claim, including Wheaton alum Russell Vought." In April President Trump nominated Vought to serve as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget. In Vought's recent Senate confirmation hearing, "in what appears to be a coordinated action with the ACLU, Senator Bernie Sanders grilled Vought." As Vought responded, "Sanders cut him off" and eventually "began yelling at Vought." A more heated exchange developed as "Ten seconds into his answer, Sanders interrupted Vought once again. ...
"A few minutes later," Senator Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Maryland quoted Vought to complain "It's your comments that suggest a violation of the public trust...."
Carter emphasizes that "Within the span of six minutes, two U.S. Senators - Sanders and Van Hollen - shamed the people of Vermont, Maryland, and the rest of the United States by establishing a new religious test for government officials." (Visit <www.goo.gl/vSP15Q> for a video of the exchange and advance to the section between 44:20 and 51:20 in the recording.)
"In response to Sanders's comments, [The Gospel Coalition] Council member and Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore said: 'Senator Sanders' comments are breathtakingly audacious and shockingly ignorant - both of the Constitution and of basic Christian doctrine.' ...
"This display of anti-Christian bias for partisan political purposes has the potential to set a dangerous precedent and must not be allowed to stand. The remarks made by Sanders and Van Hollen should be repudiated by every American who values religious freedom and opposes religious tests for government office." The Gospel Coalition, Jun 8 '17 <www.goo.gl/YmG9of>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Koran in English: A Biography, by Bruce B. Lawrence (Princeton Univ Prs, 2017, hardcover, 280 pages) <www.goo.gl/7Trzo7>
2 - American Qur'an, by Sandow Birk (Preface, Reza Aslan) (Liveright, 2015, hardcover, 464 pages) <www.goo.gl/61Qzf2>
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